BRENNEMAN, RICHARD CHARLES

Name: Richard Charles Brenneman
Rank/Branch: United States Air Force/O2
Unit: 555 TFS
Date of Birth: 25 March 1942
Home City of Record: Mishawaka IN
Date of Loss: 08 November 1967
Country of Loss: North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 212000 North  1041800 East
Status (in 1973): Returnee
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F4C
Missions:
Other Personnel in Incident:
Refno: 0896

Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews. 2023

REMARKS: 730314 RELEASED BY DRV



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Richard Brenneman retired from the United States Air Force as a Lt. Colonel.
He and his wife Grace reside in California.

Information on Richard Brenneman can also be found on pages 22 and 23 of
Benjamin Schemmer's "THE RAID." It states:

The prisoners at Son Tay got to spend more time outside than in other camps
because the North Vietnamese were enlarging the compound, building a new
interrogation room and a small kitchen-dining hall for the guards.  Before
Mo Baker arrived and began his enthusiastic assault on the brick pile, Ralph
Gaither and the other POWs had been put to work building a new compound
wall, about 60 feet beyond the north wall that lay just outside the Opium
Den and Beer House. The interrogation room Mo Baker was breaking up bricks
for and another small cellblock were being built just inside the new wall.

The North Vietnamese were improving Son Tay in other ways.  They had the
prisoners plant two steel pipes to hold poles for a volleyball net-so the
guards could play, not the prisoners.  One day, Air Force Captain Richard C.
Brenneman, a November 1967 shootdown, brashly shimmied up the volleyball
pole, right in the middle of the compound, and took a look outside the
walls.  It was "pretty obvious," a big "no no." A guard in the tower by the
front gate spotted him.  The North Vietnamese were "irritated." They threw
Brenneman "under the tower" - a favorite form of torture at Son Tay.
Brenneman was locked up in a small shack for 30 days, baking by day,
freezing at night, choking in the stench of his own excrement.  The guards
hauled him out only long enough to beat him when he refused to admit that he
had climbed the pole on anything but a whim. Brenneman took it well, but
finally got an order from the camp's SRO to write an apology to the North
Vietnamese before they broke him and extracted something critical, like the
real purpose of his trip up the pole, or communication methods and codes.
Brenneman wrote the note.  It said something harmless like "I'm sorry I was
a bad boy," and the camp commander ordered him to be released.